Blogs

This time it's for real: PokerStars actually bought all of FullTilt Poker's assets. This means FullTilt is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the PokerStars company.
As you probably alredy know, the fuss started when, due to the black friday, the whole world realized FullTilt was not only doing bad things in the USA, but also a completely rigged room regarding the way it handled the players' bankrolls.

So now, the famous PokerStars poker room bought it all. What does it mean? What will happen? Is it a good news?

Well, it probably is one hell of a good piece of news indeed. But a few details remain to be cleared.

Indeed, it should put an end to one of the longest, and darkest saga in the online poker community. Still, one has to notice a few details, and wait until the whole process is over...

Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet were two rooms well known for causing outrage in the poker community, for one very good reason : they were rigged, plain and simple.

Yes. Those who tell you otherwise are wrong. Those who tell you that riggism can't exist in the online poker world are just plain wrong, and they're wrong in that very case: Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet, two "sibling" rooms, were simply rigged, with what we call the superuser case.

Well, guess what? We've got some news on that story! We just learned that some victims of this huge superusers scam had just decided to sue Ultimate Bet. They will take them in court and ask for damages. Indeed, they claim they were stolen big sums of money that they didn't get back. And that now is payback time.

We hear about those from time to time... While Rigged Poker mostly deals with rooms rigging the game to maximize their incomes from players, it also has to be said that many players also try to rig the games to maximize their incomes. And sometimes, they succeed big time too!
Actually, while most poker rooms rigging remains unproven as of today (although several hints points to this being likely at least for some rooms), many cheating scandals are now proven, and players should really care about that.

The latest news of that kind is about a german guy scamming several people by seeing their hole cards... and apparently he scammed them of quite a lot of money...

This has been around since 2006 and surfaces again and again every once in a while : should the US legalize online poker with real money for the american citizens?
Indeed, as of today, playing online poker for money is still forbidden at federal level in the United States, and that also means that no poker room is allowed to operate from within the United States.

The problem is that american poker plays who do want to play online poker will do so, on any website willing to accept them. Which means, not always the most regulated and honest ones.

Would legalizing poker in the United States allow for regulated rooms operating from within the US and controlled against riggism?

We all know that Full Tilt currently tries to get back in business, and seems to be working hard at it, after a long period of downtime with no possibility whatsoever for players to cashout. Anyway, as of today, players are the ones paying the bills.
Full Tilt is actually one of the rooms that uses players' money to finance oneself, and when the business goes wrong, there's nothing the players can do to get their money back, because the room has used it already.
This is another form of riggism. It is less visible, but makes one rages nonetheless, and besides, unlike other kind of riggisms, this one is completely evidence-based.

As you may have noticed, we have had severe downtimes during the last few days. I believe I owe you some explanation on what happens :
Being more and more successful, Rigged Poker was also getting increasingly slow to load, our server being clearly undersized for such a website. A situation we couldn't let go. So we decided to move to another server and, actually, another hosting provider... unfortunately, things didn't go the way we expected...

Welcome back !
We finally did it. We now feel Rigged Poker to be ready for everyday use.

For those who don't know (yet) about us, I'll repeat from last news : Rigged Poker has been, for almost a year, the best website in french to analyze and talk openly about any question linked with rigging of online poker. And now, we're going international!

Rigged Poker International vows to be the best international website to openly discuss rigging in poker, honesty of online poker rooms, or related topics such as playing online poker without risking one's own money.

After almost a year of existence, Rigged Poker France launches its international wing.
Rigged Poker has been, for almost a year, the best website in french to analyze and talk openly about any question linked with rigging of online poker.

Is online poker rigged ? Our goal is not really to give a final answer to that question. Instead, we try to give room for debate, let anyone talk about what they witnessed, and try to analyze what's going on in the little world of Online Poker.